No.320.
Hongkong.
population, the racial division corresponds very often to the actual state of affairs and indicates a very strong desire for much separation. But the present proposal is to provide an area where Europeans are to have rank while (and in -roncated) Chinese are confined to many secluded areas. The reason for excluding them is that their competition would raise the rents. Such a scheme is not in accordance with our methods of administration and is calculated to defeat the proper object of the reservation, viz. protection of the more intelligent section of the community from malaria; and the scheme, I think that, in approving it, rules should be laid down that Educated Chinese, who are generally supposed to have sanitary habits, should always be granted permission to reside in the selected area.
I quite agree. Let me see draft CP.229 at once.
J. me 29/8 C. C.
34167 Tec Government House, Hongkong, 18th July, 1902.
52
I have the honour to inform you that in the year 1899 a proposal was made on behalf of European residents in Kowloon that Government should establish a reservation there within which no Chinese houses should be permitted to be built, on the lines of the European reservation made in Victoria under Ordinance No. 16 of 1888.
2. That portion of the Kowloon Peninsula where Europeans principally reside is intersected by strips of land not yet built over, and on which the owners are at liberty to build Chinese houses or any other class of houses they wish. Under Section 8 of the Ordinance above quoted Government can refuse to sanction the building on a particular site, already built upon, of a house of a different class to that formerly standing on the site.
It would have been an easy matter, therefore, to have made a European reservation out of the land already carrying European houses, but such reservation would have been useless without bringing into it the vacant intersecting strips of land referred to.
3. Negotiations with the owners of these were entered into, but the majority of them refused to agree to have their land reserved for European houses unless they were...
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN, M.P., &C. &C...
9.